1 - A dark introduction

XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 Black edition

You have got to love how much diversity there is on the market when it comes to product choices. Face it, manufacturers are milking anything these days. Where overclocking used to be a taboo in the hardware arena as a feature a couple of years ago, these day's it's good business. And that's okay, as when a manufacturer pre-overclocks a card for you (running it slightly faster than specced) you get to keep the benefit of your warranty. The downside, often these products are more expensive.

King of pre-overclocked products has to be XFX, their speed-bin of releasing OCed products is exceedingly fast. I do not think that there is an XFX product out there that is not available as a triple X edition or other series name slapped on top of it.

Today will be no different, we received XFXes top of the shelf product; the GeForce 9800 GX2. The cool thing is that this is the new mystified named 'Black edition' series of cards, meaning it comes with a nice pre-overclock and a lovely game bundle.

So we'll review exactly this product today. But before we can do that ... we need to tell you a thing or two (literally) about the GeForce 9800 GX2 as a card in general.

See, a while ago a female green goblin from NVIDIA gave birth to a Siamese twin. Two graphics processors brought together on one graphics card, Ying & Yang slapped onto two PCBs, that in essence is the product that we'll be talking about today.  Based on two more energy efficient G92 processors, shrunk die-size and some internal tweaks, the 9800 GX2 will go where the GeForce 8800 Ultra left off, the "Oeltra" is EOL and was replaced by this product.
We'll look at the design; technology; performance; the pro's the con's... and well, everything. If you're new to Guru3D, or just wonder why our articles are so long... well that's just me and my crazy fetish for satisfying hardware.

Well, have a peek, and then let us continue at the next page where we'll chat a little about the architecture behind that cooler.